This week in AI updates: Google’s UCP standard, a redesigned Slackbot, and more (January 16, 2026)

Google has announced a new open-source standard for agentic commerce called the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).
GitHub

OpenWorldSAM: Extending SAM2 for Universal Image Segmentation with Language Prompts [NeurIPS 2025]

OpenWorldSAM pushes the boundaries of SAM2 by enabling open-vocabulary segmentation with flexible language prompts. [2026-1-4]: Demo release: we’ve added simple demos to run OpenWorldSAM on images ...

NBCUNIVERSAL ENHANCES ACCESSIBILITY FOR ITS COVERAGE OF THE MILAN CORTINA 2026 WINTER OLYMPICS

NBCUniversal owns the U.S. media rights to the Olympic Games through 2036, which are scheduled for Milan Cortina (2026), Los ...
MUO on MSN

VLC player is great, but this is the minimalist player you should be using instead

VLC will always be a fantastic piece of software for troubleshooting or playing broken files on an old computer. But for your ...
IEEE

Predicting Session-Level Video Streaming Connection Failures by Natural Language Understanding of Historical Tabular Data

Abstract: Video streaming has gained widespread acceptance, but connection failure is still an critical quality of service problem and hurts user QoE. Accurate and timely prediction of sessions' ...